The Challenge

Founded at MIT and launched on Kickstarter, Ministry of Supply (MoS) built a thriving ecommerce brand before expanding into brick and mortar. With two stores they were seeing great results and had big plans for growth, but their point of sale couldn’t keep up.

Ministry of Supply (MoS) was born out of a desire for dress clothes that weren’t uncomfortable or stuffy, and didn’t require costly and time consuming trips to the dry cleaner. “Our founders met at MIT and have been on a mission to engineer highly technical, easily manageable, sharp garments ever since 2012” explains Director of Retail Sarah Slaughter.

With a successful ecommerce brand, MoS first expanded into brick and mortar in 2014. They started with a point of sale that came as an add-on to their ecommerce platform. The system worked well for their first store, but wasn’t able to manage inventory and reporting across multiple locations, an issue they knew would compound as they grew. With their growth plans in place the team starting looking for a platform that was built for multi-location brick and mortar retail.

“We moved to Vend because we knew it had the features we needed to support our growth. The intuitive system and ease-of-use made the change appealing, and regular enhancement and releases continuously help us improve our efficiency.”Sarah Slaughter, Director of Retail

The Solution

MoS wanted to find a system that could support them at two stores and beyond. Vend has continued to deliver through MoS’s expansion to eight stores within two years.

MoS now uses Vend to manage sales and inventory across all seven stores, utilizing its features to help with stock takes, replenishment plans and merchandising decisions. Vend’s easily filterable reports helps the team decide which stores should receive certain stock, and they can quickly transfer and return stock between locations.

“Vend made it possible for us to have inventory accountability across our stores which was crucial since we fulfill online orders from stores” says Sarah. “The additions to functionality - such as the Vend iOS app - have allowed us to become more efficient in conducting inventory counts, and the intuitive POS design has helped us prevent sales errors. We can also be nimble in adding SKUs to our stores given the ease to add products to our Vend store.”

Vends integration with Shopify gives MoS a one-stop-shop sales report for all channels. By pulling reports that cover sales both in-store and online, they save time and can make better decisions thanks to easily accessible data.

“As we continue to open more stores, Vend allows us to track inventory across all of our locations individually, as well as provide a holistic view of the business. Opening and managing new stores is easy with Vend’s intuitive system.”Sarah Slaughter, Director of Retail

Ministry of Supply brings their solution together with the best in retail

The Results

It was the inventory and reporting features that brought Ministry of Supply to Vend, but the system has exceeded expectations and helped grow every part of their business.

As well as delivering the inventory and reporting features they needed, MoS found plenty of added benefits from switching to Vend.

The intuitive design of the system makes opening and closing the store quick and easy, and helps prevent errors. The search functions help make sure staff can find products quickly, keeping checkout time down. “The Vend POS System saves a lot of time training new staff because of its simplicity and customization features” says Sarah. “The ability to group together product categories and completely customize the PoS display screen for different outlets makes the system easy to follow in our different stores.”

As MoS grows, Vend makes it simple to open stores, add registers, and saves time training new staff. The flexibility in the cashier sell screen helps them to be more nimble with merchandising decisions and customize the system depending on location.

Recently, the team started to use Vend’s newly released Scanner App to manage their inventory counts. The iOS app allows associates to count inventory from their iPhones, syncing easily with Vend. “It is particularly useful because it allows multiple associates to count items at the same time” adds Sarah. Paired with Vend’s existing inventory count features, it has saved the team time running their monthly cycle counts and quarterly full inventory counts.

“I would definitely recommend Vend to retailers - it's an especially good tool for merchants that need advanced and easy-to-use reporting and inventory management.”Sarah Slaughter, Director of Retail

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